A symbol is not a variable, it is a value. like 9 is a value that is a number.

A symbol is a value that is kinda of roughly a string... it's just not a string that you can change... and because you can't change it, we can use a shortcut -> all symbols with the same name/value are stored in the same memory-spot (to save space).

You store the symbol into a variable, or use the value somewhere - eg as the key of a hash.... this last is probably one of the most common uses of a symbol.

In this has - the symbols are the keys you can use any object as a key, but symbols are good to use as they use english words, and are thus easy to understand what you're storing/fetching... much better than, say numbers. Imagine you had:

It would be annoying and hard to remember that attribute 1 is the colour... it's much nicer to give names that you can read when you're reading the code. Thus we have two options: a string, or a symbol.

There would be very little difference between the two. A string is definitely usable eg: